Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is called a mystery because it is a divinely revealed truth that surpasses our understanding. Finite human minds, even the most brilliant, cannot fully comprehend an infinite God.

That being said, we can mention a few things about the topic. For example, we know that God exists as the Holy Trinity. God is one Divine Being and three distinct Persons. We believe in one God, not three gods. We hear the invocation of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity in Paul’s farewell at the end of today’s second reading: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

The Church has tried over the centuries to teach the concept of God as “three in one” through analogies. For example, Saint Patrick famously used the shamrock as an image. He pointed out that there are three lobes but only one shamrock. The image of a triangle has also been used to demonstrate how there are three sides but only one triangle. These, and other analogies, ultimately fall short, however, because the Divine Persons cannot be reduced to mere parts of God, like lobes of a shamrock or sides of a triangle. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each fully God.

Although God far exceeds our limits of understanding, the existence of a triune God does teach us something quite significant, namely, that God himself is a loving relationship. Sacred Scripture tells us that God is love (1 Jn 4:8). The opening line of our Gospel contains one of Scripture’s most famous passages about God’s love: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Because the three Divine Persons are distinct, they can love one another, and because God is one, this love remains unified. The Holy Trinity forms a perfect community of love: the Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; and the love between the Father and Son is the Holy Spirit.

Like the Holy Trinity, we also are meant to exist in relationship with others. Our human relationships provide us with fundamental experiences of giving and receiving self-sacrificial love. When we understand that it is God who gives us the capacity to love others, these same relationships give us an opportunity to experience deep fulfillment. In fact, the Church goes so far as to state the following: “Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (Gaudium et Spes 24). We discover our authentic selves when we choose to bring God’s love to the people who share our journey. The gift of self we make to them then becomes, in a real way, our gift of self to God.

Therefore, the existence of a triune God teaches us something vitally important and practically instructive: Since God is a community of love in his very nature, we, too, as human beings created in God’s image, are meant to build and become a community of love.

(Fr. Michał Pająk, OMI, May 31, 2026)